Mitchell Baker, executive chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit best known for its Firefox browser, announced Eich's resignation in a blog post Thursday afternoon, apologizing to users for its slow response. "We’re sorry. We must do better," she said.

Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.

Known as the father of the programing language JavaScript, Eich donated $1,000 in 2008 to support Proposition 8, a California constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage. News of his contribution first came to light in 2012, but the controversy resurfaced when Eich, who previously served as CTO at Mozilla, was named to the top post last month. Following the appointment, Mozilla employees began publicly asking him to step down. Adding to that, dating site OKCupid on Monday published a letter on its website urging users on Firefox to switch browsers.

"What’s next for Mozilla’s leadership is still being discussed," Baker said. "We want to be open about where we are in deciding the future of the organization and will have more information next week. However, our mission will always be to make the Web more open so that humanity is stronger, more inclusive, and more just: that’s what it means to protect the open Web."

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